Page 4 of Cowboy Bull's Promise

I learned the truth young.

That the Rut isn’t just dangerous. It’s a lifetime sentence for anyone caught in its path.

And for someone like me? For someone with the same blood, the same beast lurking just beneath the surface?

It is the one thing I fear more than anything else in this world.

Because one day, it would come for me.

One day, I’d feel that pull.

The raw, vicious hunger clawing up from the depths of my soul, stripping me of reason, tearing away the last pieces of my humanity.

And when that day came, would I be strong enough to resist it?

Or would I become the very thing I hated?

Would I become him?

No! My Bull bellows in response, so loudly inside me I almost fall to my knees.

I fucking refuse to believe that’s my fate.

I won’t be shackled to some primal curse, doomed to repeat the same damn mistakes as the man who left me nothing but a name I don’t claim and a bloodline I want no part of.

I’ve spent my life running.

Not just from my past, but from the thing inside me—the thing that wants. The beast that stirs in my blood, whispering in a language older than words.

Urging.

Pushing.

That most basic, biological instinct to breed, to carry on the species, to claim and take and own.

I refuse.

I won’t be like him. I won’t let the Rut turn me into something I can’t control, something I can’t live with when the dust settles and the hunger fades.

I’ve been running from it all my life.

I chase distractions.

I bury the gaping void my so-called parents carved into me when they turned their backs. When they made it clear that I was nothing more than a mistake.

That’s part of why I came here—to Barren County.

To a place where no one knows my name, where my past can’t find me.

Where I can work myself to exhaustion, burn off the restless energy always twisting inside me.

A wanted ad for ranch hands in New fucking Jersey, of all places?

Yeah, it sounded like a joke at the time.

But something about that ad—Max’s cousin printing it on his behalf, knowing full well his greenhorn relative had no clue how to run a place like this—clicked for me.

Like destiny.

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